Faerie Solitaire Dire

[Pkeod]

Faerie Solitaire Dire is one of our next projects. Like FSH it has technically been in development for a few years, but didn’t get active development time for most of those years. It was originally a Monkey-X project, and has been ported to Defold. Here’s the Steam page

This thread will journal its development toward eventual Steam release!

Something interesting is that Dire already has more than 1,000 wishlists on Steam. FSH only just reached 1,000 wishlists when it released! So this is a good sign of progress on the Steam platform for games like this.

We are targeting a release date of October, if we do not make that we will target December. Let’s just say for now release date of Halloween (there is no official release date, only “2019” but this will be the target for progress ). So with that target 82 days until release!

When we first conceived of FSH and FSD they were each thought to be as opposites in different directions of our old 2009 game Faerie Solitaire. FSH was supposed to be much easier, FSD was supposed to be much harder. Naturally both iterated beyond those ideas in their own ways. The first version of FSD we released to early supporters was super hard 100% of the time. What we’re doing now is keeping the challenge but evening it out so it’s more balanced over time with more variation.

We are lucky because FSD benefits from a ton of the work we just finished with FSH. So on top of what was already done years ago it gets a head start in polish in many ways, and we can focus on other things. My first focus with Dire will be pet art. I’ll be experimenting with animating the pets this time, using spine to give them some idle animations and reactivity to cursors / clicking so they all feel alive.

There’s more to say and show so until next time!

[Pkeod]

77 days until Halloween!

There’s still a ton of work left to do. Right now I’m making battle plans for how we are going to create all of the content in time. Unlike FSH, Dire has an A-Z story. Not only that but it has some non-linear aspects to its story. Instead of being a single long loop, the player can choose locations, and within those locations there may be unique story elements.

I have a gist of the story done and rubber stamped by those involved. I still need to write the entire script text out. There’s older story text but it’s being scrapped / reworked into the new ideas. After the script is done then I need to illustrate all of the characters and…

There are 2 main sections to the story, and each main section has a dozen or so landmark points in the story with each landmark having several locations with story and so on. So with a vague multiplication of those things… it’s a lot of content. Luckily a lot of content is already done and will be reworked to fit in, but it’s still also a lot more left to do.

FSH’s release estimate was off by a while but not by much. We targeted Easter and were 1 day late, because we had to wait until Monday to release it. I’m seriously going to try to make Halloween with Dire but we will be racing the clock hard and cannot suffer timing setbacks to make it. Even if it’s not made as long as we release Dire 1.0 in 2019 I will be happy even if it’s just before Midnight on new year’s…

I mentioned before about animating pets with spine - that is the plan, but I’m going to test making 3d assets for the pets too. Imagine looking into mini rooms where 3d models of the pets are, and if you change the mouse position (or mobile device tilt) the perspective inside of each window changes with it… I think that would be super cool and I think it’s possible but it’s both a lot of work and something I need to spend figuring out. It would be even cooler if they had idle animations, and were able to react to cursor clicking (like a horse reacting to a fly landing on it…). If the 3d tests turn out well then I’ll commit to it, otherwise it will be spine + 2d assets in maybe a 3d space.

[Pkeod]

72 days until Halloween!

I’ve been posting some for Harvest, mostly for post release issues, but I’ve also been working on Dire behind the scenes…

I greatly appreciate FMOD Studio but we can’t afford to spend $2k on a license for Dire, and we would have to wait until April 22nd to release Dire if we used FMOD to use it for free - and there are no other options for lower prices. I still want to target this year so we are going to switch to OpenAL most likely. With this extension by @sergey.lerg https://github.com/Lerg/extension-openal and adding features we need ourselves or bribing other developers with money to contribute. I think there is OSS we can use to convert audio in convenient ways FMOD does too… there are also special considerations for mobile which have to be addressed eventually. If OpenAL turns out good and we get other tools and scripts to be just as productive then we may stick to it for good (and keep helping its Defold extension to improve), if not we’ll switch back to FMOD when we can for the next project after Dire.

I am NOT recommending against using FMOD. If you have a big commercial project absolutely use it, it is a huge productivity boost for audio.

[Pkeod]

Dire wishlists on Steam are at 1,596 so far.

We are on track to get a private alpha available to early testers by Halloween. Currently we are for sure not going to make October release, but December is still possible. The audio situation is still not improved and it is a hard blocker for release.

28 days until Halloween!